The Secret Double Life of Mister Cee, Hip-Hop's Most Beloved DJ

Mister Cee is as central to the story of rap as the rappers themselves. Biggie Smalls, Jay Z, Big Daddy Kane—Cee came up with all of them, helped launch their careers, and has spent the past two decades spinning their records at Hot 97, the radio station synonymous around the world with hip-hop. But last year, Mister Cee's own story began to take a bizarre and shocking turn, until finally, while millions of people listened, all his demons came tumbling out

MAY 6, 2013, HOT 97, LIVE ON AIR:

Good morning to everybody! I’m here, and I’m ready to go, man.

Are you gay?

I am not gay.

Every weekday, Calvin Lebrun—Wallop King, the Finisher, or as he’s known to most of the New York City area and around the world, Mister Cee—rises around 10 A.M., thinking about radio. There is a calendar he keeps by his bed that’s inscribed with anniversaries—March 9, the day his friend Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G., was murdered, or October 17, Eminem’s birthday—and he consults it shortly after waking up. If the occasion warrants, he’ll begin preparing one of the on-air tributes for which he is beloved. By noon he’s on air.

There are slight variations to the routine. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights he does club gigs. Manhattan, New Jersey, Staten Island, wherever. I’m a gypsy cab, he says. Because his time in rap dates from his days DJing for Big Daddy Kane in the ’80s, because he helped broker the deal that got Biggie Smalls signed, and because he’s been a warm, boisterous presence at the world’s most revered hip-hop radio station, New York’s Hot 97, for going on two decades, he is extremely well connected. So occasionally, someone like Jay Z might hand him or his friend Funkmaster Flex, who does Hot 97’s evening show, an exclusive premiere of a song, like 2009’s D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune), on which Jay shouted out the two of them: I made this just for Flex and / Mister Cee, I want people to feel threatened. That night, the two of them played the record over and over, gloating in the direction of most every other DJ in the city—Take that big lemon-meringue pie in your face!

And then there were the two days last year, one in May and one in September, when Mister Cee found himself in front of a microphone far earlier in the morning than usual, sitting across from his boss, Ebro Darden, the on air sign glowing red above them, searching for a radio-friendly synonym for the word fellatio. Searching for the appropriate term to describe a man who looks and dresses like a woman. Searching for a way to say he did, or did not, pay cash to engage in certain activities with that person. Searching for a way to say: Have I lied about getting sexual fellatio in a car with a transsexual? Yes, I have lied about that.

Searching for a way to hold back tears, or to deceive, or to forestall judgment.

And then searching for a way to let the tears come without shame or embarrassment, to tell the truth about who he is, even if it’s not entirely clear—even to Mister Cee himself, even now, to this day—what exactly that truth is.

MAY 6, 2013, HOT 97, LIVE ON AIR:

I’m gonna tell you why I’m mad: Everybody’s like, Yo, [Ebro,] is Cee gay or he’s not? I was like, I don’t know, but he either is, or he likes chicks that look like dudes, or he likes ugly chicks, or he likes dudes that’s dressed up as chicks. I don’t know what it is, but something’s happening here.

That’s what—that’s how you feel. That’s your opinion. And I’ve been dealing with—

’Cause to go try to get a prostitute and it ends up being a dude? It looks like a dude, man.

He intends to talk about all of it—the arrests, the double life, the women whom he’d loved, the weekends he’d drive up and down Christopher Street and the strangers he’d pick up there and pay for oral sex, the lies he told and then apologized for telling, the job he quit, live on air, and then reclaimed the next day. He’ll try to tell the story as best he understands it.

But first, we’re going for a ride.

Up through Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, on a windy Saturday in October, on our way to a club in Queens. Cee—round, taciturn away from the microphone, stone-faced until he smiles, which is more often than you’d think—is driving, winding the car through his old neighborhood, pointing out landmarks as he goes. Here is the metal lamppost where, back in the ’80s, Cee and his friends would siphon power for park jams. Over there is where he and Big Daddy Kane shot the Show Prove video, with Jay Z and Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

Lafayette Gardens projects: redbrick, city-worn. Cee grew up here. His uncle was a DJ; his next-door neighbor had turntables. It was the moment that all over the city people were piecing together what hip-hop would become. You’d stay up late to listen to the Supreme Team on WHBI, or a friend might pass you a live-performance tape—dubbed-into-oblivion recordings from Harlem, the Bronx, Queens—of the Cold Crush or Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Or maybe you’d go to school one day—Sarah J. Hale, only a couple of blocks from where the Brooklyn Nets now play—and find a guy rapping in the lunchroom in a white leather jacket, a feather in his ear, walking around with a cane, calling himself MC Kane.

A few blocks east, at a brownstone with a tony Corcoran for sale sign hanging outside, Cee pulls over. This is the house where I was raised by my mother and father, until he went to live with his grandparents in Lafayette Gardens. He gestures just to the left, at the top floor of a boarded-up house covered in vinyl siding. And that’s the house where I recorded the Biggie demo.

It goes like this, spending time with Cee. He has been around history—sometimes as a DJ, other times as an engineer, an adviser, a sympathetic ear. There he is on turntables on Big Daddy Kane’s 1988 debut, track nine—Mister Cee’s Master Plan—or on tour in 1990, being accompanied by a hype man and sometime drug dealer calling himself Jay-Z. When a shy, overweight local kid from down the street in Bed-Stuy needed his demo tape re-recorded, he showed up at Cee’s door, the door we’re idling outside right now, to rap the tracks again. It was Cee who, starting in 1993—first on Brooklyn’s public-access station 91.5 WNYE and then on Hot 97, where he remained—would play the then unknown Brooklyn artist. And after Biggie died, it was Cee who went on the radio to memorialize him—something he still does to this day, for more people than just Biggie. When I started doing the tributes for Biggie, Cee says, that’s what made me think: Why am I just only doing a tribute to Big? Why don’t I do a tribute to all of our fallen people? So he keeps a list, writes the names on his calendar, goes on air and tells wild stories and plays obscurities and brings back, through the depth and urgency of his recollection, those that are gone: Guru from Gang Starr, Aaliyah, Big Pun, all of our fallen kings and queens.

At Hot 97, Funkmaster Flex might humiliate some poor soul one night, if he’s in a bad mood or if he feels he’s been wronged. I like that type of back-and-forth, Flex says gleefully. But Mister Cee’s personality, Flex says, is different. You kind of know he’s not going to go at you. Cee talks with his hands. It makes the people around him feel protective. You can see it in the car: Away from the microphone, or a laptop, or a turntable, he’s almost diminished, not entirely there, like he’s waiting to go back in the booth.

Let me show you one more thing before we start heading to the club, Cee says, starting up the car. We drive for a few blocks, take a left, pause outside a white marble apartment building. You can tell where we are just by the way the silence falls in the car. You see how close everything is, Cee says after a while. Biggie’s old place.

If we had a little bit more time, I would’ve took you to where Jay Z’s from, which is up the street from us, too, he says, shifting back into drive.

MAY 6, 2013, HOT 97, LIVE ON AIR:

There’s two things I care about. Two. One, Mister Cee, if you are gay or that’s your preference, you don’t need to hide. You’re our family member, and we’re here to support you.

I got that.

Second thing I care about: Why do you keep committing crimes of solicitation of prostitution? You need help.

All right, we gonna get into that. Now, which one—which one do you want to get into first?

We’ll start with number one. You already answered. You said you’re not gay. Then I said, But do you like homosexual activity? You said no.

Right.

Two, why do you keep soliciting prostitutes when you know it’s a crime, and why are you in areas where, uh, I guess—what do they call it, transgender prostitution takes place?

That’s two questions.

Most of his life, he had girlfriends. One day we meet up at a Chinese-food spot near where he grew up and he starts listing them, all the women he’s loved. His first serious girl, from high school, he dated for four, four and a half years, and for a while he thought they’d get married. But she didn’t believe he’d succeed and told him so. You’re not Run-DMC! You’re not LL or the Fat Boys! That was it for me, he says.

On the Kane tours, he says, he was fucking everything in sight. The whole time he had a steady girlfriend, too. Once, he says, coming off tour, he gave her gonorrhea. It was the most horrible thing I ever did to a woman in my life, Cee says. She called him last year, after Cee had a run-in with the guy she was dating, just to tell him off again. I mean, cursed me out, just called me all types of faggots and homos.

And then there was one last great love, who didn’t trust him and so broke his heart. This was around 2000. She became suspicious about what he did when she wasn’t around, and she started calling other women in Cee’s life—friends, co-workers, whomever—to vent her suspicions: She was the last woman that I could really, fully, 200 percent trust. After me and her broke up, it just got harder for me to trust women. It wasn’t misogyny, exactly—or maybe it was. Either way, it was the end of any real intimacy in Cee’s life.

He was in strip clubs a lot, he says, at the end of that relationship. And I started tricking in the strip clubs. I don’t know if you know what tricking is—you’re taking [the girls] out the club—literally right outside the club—and you’re having sex with them. He’d do it in places where he wasn’t liable to be recognized, usually spots around downtown Manhattan where white guys was going, he says.

It’s hard to say how the other thing, as Cee sometimes calls it, got started. But he knows when: Around 2005, 2006.

Though it is perhaps hard to believe him, he says it never occurred to him until he started doing it. It wasn’t a long-held fantasy or a desire he’d held at bay for a while and then succumbed to. But soon he found himself on Christopher Street, a couple of blocks from the Hot 97 oces, nearly every weekend, out there—like, really out there.

He never really asked himself why he was doing it and still can’t entirely explain why he was drawn to this specific, highly particular thing. This conversation we’re having right now, over shrimp and fried rice, is only the second or third time he’s ever actually tried to put it into words. Certainly it’s the first time he’s told the story to a reporter. The best way I can explain it is that I was so knee-deep into doing it that it became a part of me, he says.

It’s also the rush of: Get horny, A and B—you know, one plus one equals two. You get horny, go out, go get your shit off. It became a part of my routine. Even though I was fearful, there was a part of me that felt invincible, too.

So are you establishing that you’re not ready to come out? Is that what you’re establishing right now?

No, if I—if I choose—if I’m lying and I choose not to come out, that’s my choice.

The things he did to himself to avoid telling the truth. In 2011, after he was arrested—it wasn’t the first time; he was caught in 2010, too, fucking trying to pull my pants up, and I’m scared as shit—the New York Daily News wrote an article reporting it. Mister Cee, a popular HOT 97 deejay and record producer, it read, was busted for public lewdness after cops caught him in a car receiving oral sex from another man, authorities said. The day the article came out, Cee says, he felt like an actual dead person. Literally dead, in the casket, in the coffin. In his mind, a whole funeral scene unfolded: who came and didn’t come, who was mourning, who was laughing from the back of the pews.

He slept a lot after that, he says. Drank so much soda he almost lost his sight. I would buy two-liter Fanta Orange, two-liter Sprite, two-liter root beer—and I live by myself—just guzzling them. That’s how I was getting through my pain, fucking going to sleep and drinking soda. And I’m not even a soda drinker. I drunk so much soda to the point where my diabetes—my sugar level went so high, I started getting blind.

Brooklyn’s Finest: Hip-hop might’ve been born in the South Bronx, but it grew up here, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where Biggie, Jay Z, and Mister Cee all lived within a few blocks of one another. Above, an annotated map of where they all began. Click to enlarge.

The court mandated a therapist, so he went and told lies to a therapist. He had stories he would tell: It was a woman in the car with him, not a man; he’d been at the wrong place at the wrong time; there were bloggers, haters, unnamed malevolent forces spinning stories, trying to bring him down. He even lied to the cops, who took care of him the first couple of times he was arrested—Once you walk in the station, all it takes is one black officer to recognize you—but whose patience ran out when the arrests continued to mount: When I got arrested in 2011—this is just my theory—that came out from the D.A.’s office. That leaked from the D.A. That didn’t leak from a precinct. You know, after a while, I’m making deals with the D.A.: I’m never going to do this again. I’m never going to do this again. And they’re like, Okay, all right. All right. And they let me slide the first couple of times. That third time, they was just like, Yo…

After the first Daily News article came out, he went on the air and said nothing, just played Biggie’s Dead Wrong and Nas’s Hate Me Now, songs that in their truculence and incredulity proclaimed his innocence for him. He got caught again, in May of last year, ended up back in the Daily News—hot 97 dj mister cee charged with trying to pick up male prostitute, blared the headline—and then two days later, he was back on air, sitting across from his program director, Ebro. Because I was like, Cee, what the fuck. What are we doing? Ebro remembers. We got on the air and had the conversation.

Or, more accurately, didn’t, as Cee stammered out equivocations (Even if I wanted to lie, that’s my choice) and told the same lies he’d been telling his therapist and everyone else. All while a city of profoundly confused people listened in their cars and office buildings and headphones, wondering how the Hot 97 morning show had become a live broadcast of some unfathomable form of public therapy or performance art. I don’t have any more questions, Ebro said in disgust, ending the conversation.

Ebro says now that he had a good idea he was being lied to: I had my suspicions. But at the same time, he adds, I’ve met people and have known people in my life that did not categorize themselves as gay, right? So in the back of my mind I’m thinking, He just doesn’t categorize himself that way.

Cee had grown up in a conservative West Indian family, didn’t know how they’d react. And he’d come up in a rap era that grew less tolerant, from its first steps in downtown clubs in the late ’70s and early ’80s—where hip-hop fans and gay men and women used to stand side by side—to the ’90s, when Eazy-E died of AIDS, then thought by many to be a gay disease, and so got written out of the vanguard of rap history. Even fundamentally tolerant guys like Biggie, back then, might rhyme something like: Money and blood don’t mix, like two dicks and no bitch.

It didn’t matter that when Cee started getting caught, friends and other artists got in touch or sent their support. 50 Cent. Wyclef. Busta Rhymes. In 2011, Cee says, I reached out to Jay Z for a favor, and he came through in less than a day. Even then, he was afraid of what might happen if people learned the truth. Both his parents are dead. So is his grandfather. Now Cee takes care of his grandmother, his aunt, whoever needs help. I hold my family down, man, he says.

So he continued to lie. It wasn’t even about losing the job. I was just afraid of what the perception was going to be about me and that people was still going to want to stand behind the Mister Cee brand, he says. Promoters. People he worked with. And if they didn’t, how was I going to be able to continue to support and take care of the people that I care about?

Finally, in September—after three arrests that Cee will admit to, two Daily News articles, and one excruciating on-air interview—a blogger named Bimbo Winehouse, posing as a sex worker, made a video filmed inside Cee’s car as they negotiated a price for sex. Within a few days, the video was on the Internet. That day, September 11, Cee went on air and resigned, admitting nothing but that he believed it was untenable for the station to continue employing him.

Hot 97 released a statement accepting his resignation. But by the next morning—after a series of agonized late-night phone calls between Cee, Flex, and Ebro—Mister Cee was back on air, opposite Ebro once more while millions listened, telling the truth this time, to the extent that he understood it. Two days later their extraordinary conversation landed Mister Cee on the front page of The New York Times under the headline hip-hop, tolerance and a d.j.’s bared soul: he’s tired of denial.

I am tired of trying to do something or be something that I’m not, Cee told Ebro that morning, in between bouts of tears. I’m tired.

By noon, he was back in his old spot, resignation rescinded, boisterously calling attention to a Sly and the Family Stone chorus: Thank you! For letting me! Be myself!

The truth will set you free, he said to everyone listening.

September 12, 2013, HOT 97, LIVE ON AIR:

I know that I’m still in denial, because I know that I love women. Any woman that’s been with me know that I love women, but occasionally I get the urge to have fellatio with a transsexual, a man that looks like a woman. So—and then I’m sitting here saying, But I’m not gay, because I haven’t penetrated another man.

The first thing he did was make amends. Once I told the truth last month, I made a list of everybody who I needed to apologize to, he says. His court-ordered therapist was on that list. So was his younger sister. He still hasn’t talked to his grandmother or his aunt about it, but they know: The day he resigned, he received a text message from his aunt, who is a minister and doesn’t listen to secular music, let alone Hot 97. But somehow she heard. The text message said, I love you.

He went into the station and apologized to his co-workers. I think I said to him, Yo, that videotape was nuts! Flex remembers. And he’s laughing. Like, now we can act like we’re on the corner; we’re making fun. That’s a good thing. And then, one by one, he apologized to the other women in his life—friends and those who were maybe something more. Most understood. Some were even attracted by it—the radio interviews, especially the tearful second one, made him famous, or more famous than he already had been. But the truth is, at this point in my life, I can’t even begin to try to be in a serious relationship with a woman. That’s the point that I’m at now: What do I want? Where am I at? Now that it’s out in the open—everybody knows, I know—where am I going from here?

He knows the illegal activity needs to stop—If I get arrested right now for that same type of activity, I’m doing sixty days in jail, hands down, done—and that he could lose his job if he gets caught again.

So he’s trying to figure it out, though to hear him talk, he hasn’t figured it out at all, really. When I ask point-blank if he’s gay, he says, Absolutely not. And it’s nothing—it’s no offense to transgender women, but I only get with transgender women for one thing and one thing only, and that’s for oral sex. Like I said: I never had sex with a man. I never had sex with a transgender woman.

So he’s come a long way, and now he’s nowhere.

September 12, 2013, HOT 97, live on air:

Twelve o’clock today, you on?

Twelve o’clock today, I’m on.

In the meantime, he’s back on air. It’s worth listening to sometime, over the radio or in a nightclub, where you can find him most any weekend. In the club in Queens that we end up at after our ride through his old neighborhood, I post up in a corner while Cee DJs, just to listen to him talk to the crowd between songs: You ain’t going to put me in the corner with the bear and think I ain’t coming out of the corner without fighting that bear! I’m a lion!! I’m too strong!! He says stuff like this all the time—surrealist strings of metaphors, similes, threats, promises, boasting and bragging. He is professionally ebullient: If you got a tie, loosen it up. IF YOU GOT A VEST, TAKE THAT FUCKING VEST OFF.

There are some uneasy moments now, sure. One recent Friday evening he played Buju Banton’s Boom Bye Bye on air—a song about murdering gay men. Hip-hop has largely embraced Cee, at least publicly, but some behave differently behind closed doors. I do understand Cee’s fear, and I’ll never say the rappers’ names, Flex says, but my relationship has changed with a few rappers. Hot 97 still routinely spins the North Carolina artist J. Cole, who on his last album rapped: The same reason they call Mister Cee the Finisher / Forbidden fruit, watch for the Adam’s apple! (Cee: J. Cole, if you’re reading this: I have forgiven you for the Forbidden Fruit line, and we can move on.) He remains one of the foremost boosters of a genre that can still sometimes sound as confused about its attitudes toward gay men and women as Cee is himself.

But then there are the moments that have been surreal in an entirely different way. Cee says Big Daddy Kane called just the other day to ask, only half-jokingly, You ready to come back on the road? Kane, Cee says, is not the most expressive person when it comes to saying I love you. And within the past two years, that’s all he’s been saying to me. The past is being rewritten before his eyes.

In our booth at the restaurant, I ask if Biggie would’ve understood, had this happened twenty years ago. Oh, I know that, Cee says instantly. I know Big stands next to me. I have no question in my mind.

I ask him why he’s so sure, and he says it’s because they were friends, first, but also because hip-hop is such a transparent thing to those who’ve lived it: You know who’s phony, you know who’s hypocritical, you know who’s real. Cee is real.

And anyway, who’s going to really keep the memory of those people alive, the Bigs and the Pacs and the Aaliyahs and the Big Puns and the Big Ls and the Freaky Tahs and so on and so forth—who’s going to keep their memory alive the way that I do it?

The answer is no one, though one wonders about a life spent so deeply in the past, when the present is as confusing and rich and unknown as his is. Then he smiles, and the smile matches the smile on his black T-shirt: Richard Pryor, grinning, next to the words you can kiss my happy black ass!

So not only do I feel like Big has my back, Cee says. I feel like every person that I have ridden for in their afterlife—I think they got my back as well.

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